Samantha Ozer

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  print November 2021

  Dora Budor

  While Salento, the heel of Italy’s boot, is known for its coastline and baroque architecture, until the mid-twentieth century the region’s economy was centered on tobacco. At the industry’s peak, more than half of the subpeninsula’s population was employed in its production, and the majority of workers were women. Today many former factories and masserie, or traditional farmhouses, are being converted into restaurants and boutique hotels. Advertisements for these spaces often focus on the authenticity of the restored architecture and on the inclusion of original production equipment and tools

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  picks March 19, 2021

  Samuel Guerrero

  In his exhibition “Observatorio” (Observatory), Samuel Guerrero dissects the pictorial and ideological convention of linear perspective, which was introduced to Mexico after Hernán Cortés’s conquest of the Aztec empire in 1519 and which continued to develop with the colonization of the Americas and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century imperialism. In the process of exploring beyond the bounds of this Western tradition, the artist imagines worlds that transgress linear time and technological determinism. In the light installation Reflexiones sobre el horizonte (Reflections on the Horizon, all

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  picks November 20, 2020

  Zuzanna Czebatul

  At the end of October, following a ruling that made abortion due to fetal defects unconstitutional, women across Poland took to the streets and disrupted religious services in protest. The slogan “women’s hell,” displayed on banners hung on church walls in Warsaw, mirrors the defiant energy present in Polish artist Zuzanna Czebatul’s exhibition “Hell Hath No Fury Like A Dick Scorned.” Prominently featured is a suite of drawings of revered spaces, copied by Czebatual from Renaissance paintings in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie. Situated between architectural blueprints and sculptural objects, the works

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  interviews August 31, 2020

  Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste

  This spring, Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste filmed two static, forty-minute takes outside his apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Commissioned by Issue Project Room for their “Isolated Field Recordings” series, the videos documented a soundscape subtly inflected by the pandemic; the wails of ambulances can be heard, as can boomboxes played from the balconies of those sheltering in place; as can ominous silence. Toussaint-Baptiste made the work after the indefinite postponement of “Get Low (Black Square),” a performance at Abron Arts Center that considers Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, 1915, as

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  interviews June 29, 2020

  Lynn Hershman Leeson

  As a young artist in Berkeley during the 1960 and ’70s, Lynn Hershman Leeson’s involvement with issues of civil rights, community, and the conditions for defining a public—most notably through the Floating Museum, 1974–78—helped ground her political and social consciousness. The “museum” platform pooled community resources to commission and exhibit site-specific art in public spaces, first in the San Francisco Bay Area and then more widely in the United States, Italy, and France. She has since spent her career collaborating with scientists and technologists to challenge how we construct identity

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  picks March 03, 2020

  en llamas (in flames)

  In Spanish, llano means “plain,” and the group exhibition “en llamas (in flames)” responds to the gallery's name and the Mexican agricultural tradition of burning land to prepare and activate it for future growing seasons. Considering fire both as a natural tool for removal and renewal and as a metaphor for catalysis and catharsis, the show brings together twelve artists to offer a nuanced reflection on the overlapping crises of the pandemic and the Anthropocene. Installed in a bulkhead on the rooftop of a converted factory building in Doctores, Mexico City, the show, while geographically central,